2 Pearl Harbor fallen are ID’d and given honors

Seventy-seven years after bombs and torpedoes crippled the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government is still accounting for — and honoring — those who were lost on Dec. 7, 1941.

Electrician’s Mate 3rd Class Charles Harris, 22, and Fireman 3rd Class Robert Bennett, 18 — both crew members on the battleship USS Oklahoma — were buried Monday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific with full military honors and names on their graves for the first time since the day of infamy.

For decades the men had been interred at the “Punchbowl” cemetery as “unknowns” until scientific progress, including DNA analysis, unlocked their identities.

The Pentagon announced in 2015 that it would undertake the unprecedented step of disinterring all 388 remaining “unknown” Oklahoma crew members. About 40 identifications from the ship’s 429 casualties had been made previously.

To date, 195 identifications have been made from that group of 388, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which investigates, recovers and identifies missing American war dead. In the process, the obscured sacrifice of the fallen sailors and Marines on the Oklahoma is gradually coming back into focus.

“I think it’s something we need to do. There’s a lot of families out there who don’t know” exactly where their relatives ended up, said retired Air Force Senior Master Sgt. Anthony Creel, 59, a grandnephew of Harris.

Creel and his wife, Jo Ann, came out from California for the full military honors burial, along with the fallen sailor’s niece Joyce Black, 76, who lives in Florida.

“What I know about Charles is that there were three brothers in Pearl Harbor at the same time, just before the attack,” Anthony Creel said. “Two of the brothers, which were younger brothers to Charles, were sent back to the States because there were too many brothers in one place.”

One of the brothers is believed to have been on the USS Arizona. Both made it through the war.

Moored outboard of the USS Maryland, the Oklahoma was hit by successive waves of Japanese Type 91 aerial torpedoes, taking nine massive jolts that tore open its port side and causing the battleship to roll over and jam in the mud of Pearl Harbor.

Harris was from “good farming stocking” in Pine, La., Anthony Creel said. “We knew that Uncle Charles had been killed,” he added, but “they never provided the body. They weren’t able to identify him. So this family had been looking for closure — especially my grandmother, who passed away in ’91.”

Harris was reburied in the same grave from which he and the remains of 11 other commingled Oklahoma crew members were exhumed.

Nearly 30 Hawaii-based sailors were present to honor Harris, including a seven-member casket detail, a seven-member rifle salute team and a bugler who played taps.

An honor guard repeated the tribute the same afternoon for Bennett, a second Oklahoma crew member. Scientists used mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA analysis and anthropological and circumstantial evidence to identify the Monona, Iowa, man.

DPAA, which has a lab in Hawaii, increasingly has turned to exhumations of “unknowns” at Punchbowl as part of its mission, which also includes recoveries from remote locations worldwide.

A list of DPAA identifications over the past several months shows 40 service members accounted for from the Oklahoma, 17 other World War II identifications, 12 IDs from the Korean War and three from the Vietnam War.

For fiscal year 2018, which ended Sept. 30, DPAA accounted for 203 individuals. Another 34,000 missing American service members are believed to be recoverable worldwide.